As usage of the Internet has substantially increased, electronic commerce for people all over the world has been performed through the Internet, communication between users has gradually been developed, and very varied types of communication have been executed through the Internet.
Internet telephones as substitutes for cable telephones are now available, in addition to the electronic mail and file transmission that are the basic communication forms, and short messages can be transmitted to cellular phones using the Internet. Also, a chat service that is a communication between many users can be performed on the Internet, and a voice chat service or a video chat service can be performed through the Internet in addition to the text-based chat service.
Netizens, during the execution of the communication, have been charmed by anonymity in cyber space as they fulfill their desires to express themselves, and avatars are now widely used as means for satisfying the two points. The term “avatar” means an incarnation, and it indicates an animation character that represents the user in cyber space.
There is however a limit on expressing various conditions by using the avatar. That is, the currently used avatar generally provides a method for changing items that are additionally provided to the avatar, such as clothes or accessories, according to the user's selection, rather than changing the avatar. However, users have desired to express their unique features or current conditions by modifying the avatar in various manners, but modification of the avatar is mainly allowed only in the additional items so that various avatar modifications are not provided. Also, users can only select an avatar that has facial expressions and poses provided by the system, and they cannot combine an avatar that has various facial expressions and poses according to their intention.
Also, many users desire to show themselves while posting contents on the bulletin boards or data rooms in the communities, such as cafes or blogs, but what is permitted is only to display user IDs or nicknames in text format since it is not easy to concurrently display avatars of many users because of the avatar's multi-layer structure and large volume of data.
Further, it is difficult to expose the avatar at any location of a web page because of its multi-layer structure and large volume of data.
The above information disclosed in this Background section is only for enhancement of understanding of the background of the invention and therefore it may contain information that does not form the prior art that is already known in this country to a person of ordinary skill in the art.